Blogs

Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), voted to support net neutrality. Briefly, net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs), like AT&T and Verizon, can not create high speed Internet highways for websites and other online content, in exchange for money. At the moment, Facebook, Netflix, and the IUPUI University Library website all come to you at the same speed. High speed Internet highways could favor some websites over others for the right price. Net neutrality reinforces the concept that more and more, in a ever-growing digital world, access to the Internet (and the services it provides) is becoming a necessity and everyone should have equal access to it. All of it.

The new Journal of Brief Ideas is publishing scientific "articles" which are short statements of 200 words or less. The journal was created to provide a place for brief scientific ideas to be "archived, searchable and citable".

Like many faculty across campus, I am in the process of completing my FAR (faculty annual review). This product is something created solely for university purposes and only slightly overlaps with my personal process for reflecting on the previous year and planning for the next. I'm going to skip past the criticisms of the system to get to my point - that this process exists to help us improve. Most of the year, I rush from deadline to deadline, rarely meeting or exceeding my own expectations in this frantic pursuit of accomplishment. Last year in particular, this feeling was prevalent. Looking back, I am proud of what I accomplished but not of the path I chose to get there. This year, I resolve to do better, to achieve a better balance of work, home, and social life. These are some of the things that have inspired me and tools I will be trying out. I hope these are helpful for those of you who, like me, are not entirely satisfied with how your life progressed in 2014.

Like many others I’ve fallen into the rabbit hole that is Serial. For those not yet hooked, it’s a spinoff of NPR’s This American Life. A real life who-done-it or perhaps better, a real life are-we-sure-the-State’s-case-proves-that-the-guy-who got convicted-actually-done-it. Serial’s creators describe the podcast as, “we’ll follow a plot and characters wherever they take us. And we won’t know what happens at the end til we get there.” Its first season presentsa riveting 12-episodes that examine past and new evidence for the now 15 year-old murder trial of Adnan Syed, with some of the new “evidence” surfacing only as a result of the podcast.

Ever wondered what the top 10 cited academic articles of all time look like? How about the top 100?

A study (Van Noorden et al.) investigated this very topic using citation data provided by Thomson Reuters. According to their analysis, the top cited paper of all time is an article on protein research written in 1951 and has been cited 305,000 times. The second most cited article also focused on protein research and received about 200,000 citations. To make it into the top 10 cited articles, one needs about 40,000 citations… the top 100, about 12,000.

On the other side of the spectrum, about half of all articles indexed by Thomson Reuters have been cited 1 or 0 times.

Want to increase your citation rates? Deposit your publications into IUPUI Scholarworks, IUPUI’s institutional repository. Articles placed in institutional repositories are more likely to be read as well as cited.

Perhaps the reality of inhabiting a structure for which the assembly of requires “minimal formal skill or training” would be less than ideal. Nonetheless, the WikiHouse project is one of my favorite examples of something made available under a creative commons license. Part of why I find this project so intriguing is its potential as a unique entry point for talking to people about open-access and the creative commons. The ubiquity of makerspaces are proof, people love this kind of stuff. Imagine teaching a classroom full of students about open access publications they can use for their research and digital media they are free to use in their projects, all while they sit on open-source stools. This scenario could demonstrate to students, in a very tangible way, the power of creating something and sharing it openly under a creative commons license.

My last post examined a tool for exploring current Census data and exporting it in an easy to use format. Now what about historical Census data? Not the data from a few decades ago – we’re talking about the really old stuff. Finding this type of historical Census data is notoriously difficult, more so than finding new data. Sifting through the Decennial Censuses that have been digitized is overwhelming for your average library user. Propriety services that offer access to some historical census data with added value, such as GeoLytics, are typically expensive and not always chronologically comprehensive. Fortunately for us, as is often the case, libraries fill the void between the unpolished raw data and the propriety systems that add costly value to this data.

We are pleased to announce another step forward for open access at IUPUI.

Yesterday afternoon the IUPUI Faculty Council passed a campus-wide open access policy based on the Harvard opt-out model. This policy is an outcome of several years of persistent and creative work at IUPUI.

The policy will be implemented by IUPUI University Library Center for Digital Scholarship with support from subject liaison librarians as well as all four of our campus libraries. IUPUI's campus includes 17 schools, including the second largest medical school in the United States. This policy will increase access to a wide-range of important scholarship authored on the IUPUI campus.

The policy, which passed “unanimously,” is available from the IUPUI Faculty Council website in draft form as it was approved.

Yale University has unveiled a new digital humanities tool, Photogrammar, that visualizes and organizes photographs taken during the 1930s and 1940s under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The photographs serve as artifacts that document the yearning, despair, and humanity of Americans suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. Photogrammar allows its users to put identities and faces to American history, and reconstruct a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of what it was like to live during the Great Depression. Morning Edition, a NPR program, recently covered Photogrammar and spoke with the primary investigator of the project, Professor Laura Wexler. Professor Wexler remarks in the interview that one of the first actions users take when using the interactive map feature of the project is to look for photographs from their hometown.